This summer, before enrolling at either UCSD or Stanford,* I'll be teaching creative writing at Punahou. While they do have some resources for me to work with - a poetry and short story book that they usually employ in the course - the curriculum is more or less mine to write. This is both a blessing and a curse. Pedagogically, it's always easier to teach when the curriculum is laid out in front of you first. On the other hand - and considering I do have some free time between now and when the course begins in June - the opportunity to actually craft a curriculum according to the principles I learned as an LDT student is exciting to me.
* Yes, my California voyage continues. But it is coming to an end soon. I'll be spending the next two days on UCSD's campus before flying home to Honolulu on Friday.
As Director of NALU Studies, I did have a lot of control - in theory, anyway - over curriculum. In practice, however, three things got in the way of engaging in actual good curriculum design. First, the turnaround from my arrival on the job and the running of our first session was about a month, hardly enough time to craft an intelligible curriculum that covered almost 100 contact hours. Second, while I am comfortable with the scientific concepts we were teaching, I am not enough of an expert in marine biology to develop a strong, holistic set of lessons. Third, and most importantly, rather than building from scratch, we were working from what I would say was a deeply flawed blueprint. There were plenty of good activities in the curriculum, but no organizing principle (the same could, I suppose, be said about the organization as a whole). The result was an aimless collection of "fun" things for the kids to do, but the learning that went on was, frankly, minimal.
So how to avoid those pitfalls in this situation? Well, for one thing it helps to be starting from (ironically) a much stronger position. Of my three main problems at NALU, the first is not an issue because I'll have much more time (and no directorial duties to get in the way), the second is not an issue because I'm much more comfortable teaching writing than science, and the third is not an issue because I'm largely building from scratch, with the aid and input of teachers who do know how to write good curriculum. Which is all to say the situation is, if not ideal, pretty darn close.
In the ideal case, then, how does one go about writing a (writing) curriculum?
To begin with - and this is the most important bit, actually - it's essential to define a core purpose for the class. As in many aspects of life, a clear and succinct and specific goal at the outset of the curriculum design process will make the rest of the work go better. While this may seem obvious, it's harder to do than it sounds. The temptation is very much to jump in and start thinking about all of the cool activities that fit into a creative writing curriculum, all of the interesting ways of using technology, and all of the good assignments the students can complete.
The problem is, if you start with any of those things, you lose sight of the bigger picture, and while the student might come away with any number of particular skills, you've done a poor job shaping the overall experience. Better to pick a focal point for the course as a whole, and to ensure that every activity, technology, and assignment fits into that paradigm. That way, students can still take away particular skills as they suit student interests and the vagaries of the high school attention span, but even the least engaged student should come away with that central lesson, an "enduring understanding" that lasts far beyond the final day of the course.
A good enduring understanding, then, is like a mission statement. It is a concept or question sufficiently broad and deep to serve as an organizing principle for, in this case, five straight weeks of four-hour-a-day lessons. Too much breadth and depth, however, will lead to the same disorganization that occurs without that focal point. "What is good writing?" for example, is probably too broad a question to organize this class around, whereas "readable grammar" is too narrow and extremely boring. Somewhere in between, there's a good enduring understanding waiting to be uncovered.
Actually, the biggest challenge, at this stage, is not finding an appropriate enduring understanding, but finding one and sticking with it. It's all too easy to come up with concepts and ideas that are "enough but not too much." The problem is that it becomes extremely tempting to try to tackle too many central themes in a single class. The result is, predictably, a return to the "this lesson looks good" model of curriculum, wherein every day of the course is compelling (to the teacher, anyway), but for so many different reasons that the student's experience starts to lose cohesion. Incidentally, this is what is wrong with most current standards: there are too many core ideas.
Once I do boil the course to its core, the next layer to apply is assessment. How will I know that the students know what I want them to know? This is a sticky question, and while in creative writing there are particular accepted norms for assessment, it's important to make sure that what I do fits well with what I'm trying to teach. It's really easy to teach one thing and to test for another. The current manifestation of the standards movement, again, often makes this mistake by asking students to learn certain material, and then testing them on how well they take multiple choice tests. As a result, more and more schools are doing more "test taking training," which is a waste of instructional time that could be used to teach students to think.
Which is to say, the pitfalls here are not inconsequential. Assessment is, in reality, perhaps the most important part of the curriculum design process. Without assessment, it is impossible to know whether or not all of your cool lessons are really working, whether your students are really engaged, and whether the enduring understanding of your course is really being understood. Good assessment design and alignment, then, will be a big part of my own work in shaping my creative writing course.
Once you've answered these two questions - 1) what do I want the students to learn? 2) how will I know that they've learned it? - the rest of the curriculum building process becomes, if not easy, at least a lot more enjoyable. Instead of wracking your brain, trying to figure out how to fill the time, or trying to decide which awesome lessons to employ and which to cull, the process is much more, for lack of a better word, mechanical. Look at your daily lesson. Does it fit with the overall goal of the course? Will you be able to tell if it sticks? If the answers are "no" and "no," there's probably no reason to do it, regardless of how cool it is or how fun it sounds. Basically, the process comes down to a truism: it's easier to meet your design needs when you know what those needs are.
Now, that's all well and good in the ideal case, but what about reality? No plan survives contact with the enemy, and that is equally true in curriculum design. In my own rather limited experience, even well-laid plans require good execution pedagogically, and require vast restructuring (to say the least) sometimes when the actual students in the class have interests and learning needs that diverge wildly from those you anticipated while writing the curriculum. Which is not to say that writing the curriculum in the first place is a waste of time, but rather that, like any writing, it's a mistake to get too attached to what you write. The other lesson, here, is that the enduring understanding - the core of the curriculum - is doubly important when reality sets in, because it gives shape to those on-the-fly adaptations that must be made.
I'm sure that, as this project evolves, I'll have more to say in this space, since this blog is a kind of long-term creative writing project of my own. While I may not be able to share student work, I can assure you that - given my pedagogical biases - it's very likely I'll be completing the assignments I give, and that those assignments will end up here. Stay tuned.
Showing posts with label NALU Studies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NALU Studies. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Parable of the House
Today I've decided to resign as Director of NALU Studies. The reasons are numerous, but the essence of why I can tell in a story without implicating anyone specifically. The title, "The Parable of the House," I think is particularly fitting because it says a lot about my own perceptions. As an astrological Cancer, my home is vitally important to me, and whether I am working in a job, in an academic setting, or even just doing something for fun, it is important to me to have a sense of being at-home. The following, then, is a story of a home that proved impossible to inhabit.
Once upon a time there was a man who had traveled the world, seen much, studied much, and spoken to countless people. The man was tremendously interested in houses, but time and again found that the homes he visited were flawed. They were too gaudy, on the one hand, or too bland on the other. There were so many overcrowded small houses, and a few very empty large ones. He had spoken with architects, draftsmen, and carpenters, most of whom acknowledged how wrong things were in the world of building houses, but few - even none - of whom were willing to try to do anything about it.
The man resolved to build his own house. He found people to help who felt as he did, and set about to build a new kind of house, different and better than the kinds that other people had built before. It would be small - at least, it would start small, there was ample land nearby for expansion - but it would be his, and it would do right all those things that other people had done wrong.
Unfortunately, his co-builders and he did not get along, focused as they were on parts of the construction process that the man didn't find nearly so important. Rather than finding a way to divide labor, the man and the two co-builders fought and fought, and eventually decided to go their separate ways. The house they were building was split, one half loaded onto one of those "oversize load" trucks and driven away, the other staying on the original plot of land.
The man was happy with this arrangement, but he knew how much work he had ahead of him. He set about mending the pieces of the house that were left, and fixing it up. He worked tirelessly for months and months, until finally he was satisfied.
After all of the man's work, the house was a beautiful one, and aesthetically the better for the division that had cost the man so much work. While it was still small, it was clear to people from all over that it was different, more pleasant to live in, more well-constructed than most other houses. The man was extremely proud of this house, and so he began working on plans to build new rooms, new wings, and perhaps even new copies of the house elsewhere.
The man, however, was asked to help with someone else's project, a giant office building that needed his expert assistance and experience. The man reluctantly agreed, but only after he had contacted and enlisted the help of a young scholar to take care of the house in his absence. The scholar, having seen the house when construction was just beginning, was thrilled. He agreed to maintain and manage the property, and possibly even to make a reality out of some of the man's ideas for expansion.
Alas, shortly after the scholar stepped into the new house, he received news of a storm heading in the direction of the beautiful house. The house was built in a volatile area, and while the weather had been mostly kind to the builder, the coming storm was stronger than anything the house had seen so far. In preparation for this storm, the young scholar put aside plans for expansion and decided to make sure that the house would be secure. His first action was to inspect the foundation. Or rather, his first action was to try to inspect the foundation.
As the scholar tore through every nook and cranny of the house, he discovered that there was no basement, no crawlspace, no way to check on the supports that held the house to the land on which it was built. He began asking questions, trying to find a way to make sure the house was solid, only to discover, to his horror, that the house had no foundation at all. It was a beautiful house, mostly (inhabiting it had turned up some rough patches that needed smoothing other; some mildew stains here, some watermarks on the walls there, and some not ideal painting decisions), but it was a house built without support!
The scholar was appalled, but resolved to do his best none-the-less. He would find the blueprints, close down a room at a time, and drill down and make foundations if he had to. Surely the blueprints would say what should have been! Only, there weren't any blueprints either. Discovering this, the scholar began to panic. He searched and found time and again that documents that should have been easy to find did not exist: materials lists, building permits, records of work done by plumbers and electricians, it was all missing.
Meanwhile, the storm drew closer and closer, and its magnitude increased daily. It had become a veritable hurricane mere days before it was scheduled to arrive at the beautiful house that the old architect had poured so much of his heart and soul into. The scholar was faced with a choice. He could try to weather the storm, save the house, maybe even let it get blown away but use the same land to build a copy, or he could leave, knowing the house was likely to collapse.
The scholar thought long and hard about this decision, knowing that he would lose either way. If the house fell while he was its tenant and maintainer, the blame would fall on him, for few people knew the house had no foundation. If, on the other hand, he left, he would incur the disappointment of the old architect and his friends, and would seem a quitter. When the house fell thereafter, no one would know that it had no foundation, and they would point rather to the lack of a tenant in a storm as the reason for the house's demise.
The scholar saw that neither option was a good one, but that the former was the more dangerous. Better to escape alive and find another house, if necessary in another place, than to be present while the walls and ceiling collapsed onto his head. He left the house as the storm began to descend, frustrated and sad, but very much happy to be alive.
The moral of the story, my friends, is a simple one. For ye who build houses, do not forget to build foundations, too. For ye who rather acquire houses others have built, do not forget to make sure they are what they seem to be before you do.
Once upon a time there was a man who had traveled the world, seen much, studied much, and spoken to countless people. The man was tremendously interested in houses, but time and again found that the homes he visited were flawed. They were too gaudy, on the one hand, or too bland on the other. There were so many overcrowded small houses, and a few very empty large ones. He had spoken with architects, draftsmen, and carpenters, most of whom acknowledged how wrong things were in the world of building houses, but few - even none - of whom were willing to try to do anything about it.
The man resolved to build his own house. He found people to help who felt as he did, and set about to build a new kind of house, different and better than the kinds that other people had built before. It would be small - at least, it would start small, there was ample land nearby for expansion - but it would be his, and it would do right all those things that other people had done wrong.
Unfortunately, his co-builders and he did not get along, focused as they were on parts of the construction process that the man didn't find nearly so important. Rather than finding a way to divide labor, the man and the two co-builders fought and fought, and eventually decided to go their separate ways. The house they were building was split, one half loaded onto one of those "oversize load" trucks and driven away, the other staying on the original plot of land.
The man was happy with this arrangement, but he knew how much work he had ahead of him. He set about mending the pieces of the house that were left, and fixing it up. He worked tirelessly for months and months, until finally he was satisfied.
After all of the man's work, the house was a beautiful one, and aesthetically the better for the division that had cost the man so much work. While it was still small, it was clear to people from all over that it was different, more pleasant to live in, more well-constructed than most other houses. The man was extremely proud of this house, and so he began working on plans to build new rooms, new wings, and perhaps even new copies of the house elsewhere.
The man, however, was asked to help with someone else's project, a giant office building that needed his expert assistance and experience. The man reluctantly agreed, but only after he had contacted and enlisted the help of a young scholar to take care of the house in his absence. The scholar, having seen the house when construction was just beginning, was thrilled. He agreed to maintain and manage the property, and possibly even to make a reality out of some of the man's ideas for expansion.
Alas, shortly after the scholar stepped into the new house, he received news of a storm heading in the direction of the beautiful house. The house was built in a volatile area, and while the weather had been mostly kind to the builder, the coming storm was stronger than anything the house had seen so far. In preparation for this storm, the young scholar put aside plans for expansion and decided to make sure that the house would be secure. His first action was to inspect the foundation. Or rather, his first action was to try to inspect the foundation.
As the scholar tore through every nook and cranny of the house, he discovered that there was no basement, no crawlspace, no way to check on the supports that held the house to the land on which it was built. He began asking questions, trying to find a way to make sure the house was solid, only to discover, to his horror, that the house had no foundation at all. It was a beautiful house, mostly (inhabiting it had turned up some rough patches that needed smoothing other; some mildew stains here, some watermarks on the walls there, and some not ideal painting decisions), but it was a house built without support!
The scholar was appalled, but resolved to do his best none-the-less. He would find the blueprints, close down a room at a time, and drill down and make foundations if he had to. Surely the blueprints would say what should have been! Only, there weren't any blueprints either. Discovering this, the scholar began to panic. He searched and found time and again that documents that should have been easy to find did not exist: materials lists, building permits, records of work done by plumbers and electricians, it was all missing.
Meanwhile, the storm drew closer and closer, and its magnitude increased daily. It had become a veritable hurricane mere days before it was scheduled to arrive at the beautiful house that the old architect had poured so much of his heart and soul into. The scholar was faced with a choice. He could try to weather the storm, save the house, maybe even let it get blown away but use the same land to build a copy, or he could leave, knowing the house was likely to collapse.
The scholar thought long and hard about this decision, knowing that he would lose either way. If the house fell while he was its tenant and maintainer, the blame would fall on him, for few people knew the house had no foundation. If, on the other hand, he left, he would incur the disappointment of the old architect and his friends, and would seem a quitter. When the house fell thereafter, no one would know that it had no foundation, and they would point rather to the lack of a tenant in a storm as the reason for the house's demise.
The scholar saw that neither option was a good one, but that the former was the more dangerous. Better to escape alive and find another house, if necessary in another place, than to be present while the walls and ceiling collapsed onto his head. He left the house as the storm began to descend, frustrated and sad, but very much happy to be alive.
The moral of the story, my friends, is a simple one. For ye who build houses, do not forget to build foundations, too. For ye who rather acquire houses others have built, do not forget to make sure they are what they seem to be before you do.
Monday, October 18, 2010
On Leadership
Over the past two weeks, as I've been running our NALU 102 session along with my trusty co-teachers, I've been thinking a lot about leadership, both because of my role, and because of the expectations we ask our students to live up to. While I have been a "leader" at various times in the past in both academic and extra-curricular settings, my new position as Director of NALU Studies is the first professional leadership position I've held. While I am only some six weeks into the job, I'm finding the experience a very different kind of challenge from the ones I faced as a student at Stanford, or as a teacher with NALU when I was a mere part-time helper.
Similarly, I think our students sometimes struggle with the difference between titles and leadership, and rightfully so. One of the things I'm learning is that it is a lot easier to be a leader in a situation when you already have the title that signifies that leadership. There is less need to be assertive, to show off one's physical or intellectual powers, such as they may be. Not so for students who are title-less; they often feel that, without leadership granted to them, it is not theirs to take. I think this is both an astute observation on their part and an unfortunate fallacy, but the reasons why will not be readily apparent until we define leadership.
What is leadership? Traditionally, leaders are the people who get to make decisions, who get to shape things according to their desires and interests. The easiest thing for a leader to do, given the power that goes with leadership, is to make use of that power to orient situations and environments so they are more favorable for the leader in question. That's a broad and probably uninteresting observation, but I think it is important. Even the most progressive, forward-thinking leaders in the world know how and when to use their titles, their networks, and their other assets to transform a conversation into a representation of power dynamics. Stated more simply, without sometimes taking control of a situation, a leader cannot display leadership at all.
There is, however, something missing from the conception of leader as executor of bestowed (or taken) power. Leadership, I would argue, has a lot to do with listening, weighing options, and making choices based upon the needs of others. Indeed, that stuff is way more important than ensuring positive outcomes for oneself. That's not to say leadership is a selfless role, but rather than it is not an entirely selfish one. It is a balance, wherein the needs of a great many people must be considered.
It is here where the myriad titles that make a leader are not really important. What matters is an individual's actions, instead. A leader-in-title who merely exercises his will is no more than a selfish child, where a unremarkable, unassuming student who steps up quietly and makes sure that an upset friend's opinion is heard is clearly displaying leadership.
Of course, all of that is stuff you've probably heard or thought about before. The wrinkle, here, to me anyway, is that leadership is really a lot easier when the leader is less selfish. Whereas I think there's a natural disposition, especially in our exceedingly greed-driven society, to think that with leadership comes money, which results in a less holistic and empathetic world view, I believe that model is flawed. That's not to say that most leaders in this country (and around the world) are not well paid, but rather that most of the excessively rich ones end up working too hard and achieving little of real value. The problem with being even a rich capitalist, you might say, is that you're always looking over your shoulder at the next generation of greedy, clever up-starts who can take you down.
It's easy for me to say as director of an education program that things should be different than that. But I do honestly believe that even in a major company, good leaders do not spend the majority of their energy organizing situations for their personal benefit. Consider companies like Zappos, whose CEO takes down a pittance of a salary, or Southwest Airlines, whose founder and CEO was long the least well-compensated CEO relative to the income of his company in the country. Those companies are innovative, customer-focused, effective, and generally not evil, thanks in large part to their unselfish leadership models.
The same, of course, is true in the education space. My primary goal as a leader at NALU Studies is to grow the organization into a successful force for positive change in at-risk education in Hawaii. That's not the vision of the organization, or the mission, but it is at the heart of my decisions as a leader. It is worth noting that achieving this goal would be good for me as an individual - I think the idea that the success of a business or non-profit and the success of its leader are mutually exclusive is a silly one - but it is also the case that I cannot succeed in making a difference in at-risk education simply by looking out for myself. It is also the case, and this is the more important point, that I cannot simply act according to my own comforts and passions.
I think, less than outright greed, the greatest flaw that leaders of small organizations exhibit is the tendency towards making the organization nothing more than a reflection of themselves. Decisions are too often made that do not reflect the best interests of the organization or its stakeholders because the correct - or at least better - decisions would force the leader into a position that is uncomfortable or outside of his expertise. To me this is an understandable, but avoidable flaw. Understandable, because I think the fear of taking risks and failing is so widespread as to be almost unavoidable, even among those who articulate and understand the problems with failing to take risks. Avoidable, because I think leaders who are also general enough in their expertise are liable to not be intimidated by not having the requisite expertise to execute a decision. Why? Because a good generalist knows both where to find an appropriate expert, and also knows how to have the necessary conversations with said expert (or experts) in order to get enough information to make a decision.
Enough is a key word here. Perhaps, more than anything else, asking the right questions in order to get enough information is at the heart of leadership. No one person can know everything about everything, even in a simple situation with simple options and simple decisions. Instead, the leader is the person who is capable of making a decision with enough information. The 80/20 rule is the leader's best friend. If the first 80% of the information you need takes 20% of the work to acquire, and the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the effort to acquire, best to make your decision based on 80% of the information.
For a high school student, all of that is probably a bit beyond their interest. The kind of leadership that occurs within a cohort of ten students in a two week program is of a different kind. Only, it's really not. There's a lot to be said for intuition, and it seems to me that good leaders arise even from among students because those students also know how to operate at the level of "good enough," and also know how to subsume their personal interests to those of the cohort (or, rather, realize that their personal interests and those of the cohort are the same thing). I suppose the challenge for we teachers - as leaders in hopefully both title and deed - is to empower those leaders among us to articulate not just their understanding of a situation, but their metacognition, their recognition of their own leadership and what makes it go.
Similarly, I think our students sometimes struggle with the difference between titles and leadership, and rightfully so. One of the things I'm learning is that it is a lot easier to be a leader in a situation when you already have the title that signifies that leadership. There is less need to be assertive, to show off one's physical or intellectual powers, such as they may be. Not so for students who are title-less; they often feel that, without leadership granted to them, it is not theirs to take. I think this is both an astute observation on their part and an unfortunate fallacy, but the reasons why will not be readily apparent until we define leadership.
What is leadership? Traditionally, leaders are the people who get to make decisions, who get to shape things according to their desires and interests. The easiest thing for a leader to do, given the power that goes with leadership, is to make use of that power to orient situations and environments so they are more favorable for the leader in question. That's a broad and probably uninteresting observation, but I think it is important. Even the most progressive, forward-thinking leaders in the world know how and when to use their titles, their networks, and their other assets to transform a conversation into a representation of power dynamics. Stated more simply, without sometimes taking control of a situation, a leader cannot display leadership at all.
There is, however, something missing from the conception of leader as executor of bestowed (or taken) power. Leadership, I would argue, has a lot to do with listening, weighing options, and making choices based upon the needs of others. Indeed, that stuff is way more important than ensuring positive outcomes for oneself. That's not to say leadership is a selfless role, but rather than it is not an entirely selfish one. It is a balance, wherein the needs of a great many people must be considered.
It is here where the myriad titles that make a leader are not really important. What matters is an individual's actions, instead. A leader-in-title who merely exercises his will is no more than a selfish child, where a unremarkable, unassuming student who steps up quietly and makes sure that an upset friend's opinion is heard is clearly displaying leadership.
Of course, all of that is stuff you've probably heard or thought about before. The wrinkle, here, to me anyway, is that leadership is really a lot easier when the leader is less selfish. Whereas I think there's a natural disposition, especially in our exceedingly greed-driven society, to think that with leadership comes money, which results in a less holistic and empathetic world view, I believe that model is flawed. That's not to say that most leaders in this country (and around the world) are not well paid, but rather that most of the excessively rich ones end up working too hard and achieving little of real value. The problem with being even a rich capitalist, you might say, is that you're always looking over your shoulder at the next generation of greedy, clever up-starts who can take you down.
It's easy for me to say as director of an education program that things should be different than that. But I do honestly believe that even in a major company, good leaders do not spend the majority of their energy organizing situations for their personal benefit. Consider companies like Zappos, whose CEO takes down a pittance of a salary, or Southwest Airlines, whose founder and CEO was long the least well-compensated CEO relative to the income of his company in the country. Those companies are innovative, customer-focused, effective, and generally not evil, thanks in large part to their unselfish leadership models.
The same, of course, is true in the education space. My primary goal as a leader at NALU Studies is to grow the organization into a successful force for positive change in at-risk education in Hawaii. That's not the vision of the organization, or the mission, but it is at the heart of my decisions as a leader. It is worth noting that achieving this goal would be good for me as an individual - I think the idea that the success of a business or non-profit and the success of its leader are mutually exclusive is a silly one - but it is also the case that I cannot succeed in making a difference in at-risk education simply by looking out for myself. It is also the case, and this is the more important point, that I cannot simply act according to my own comforts and passions.
I think, less than outright greed, the greatest flaw that leaders of small organizations exhibit is the tendency towards making the organization nothing more than a reflection of themselves. Decisions are too often made that do not reflect the best interests of the organization or its stakeholders because the correct - or at least better - decisions would force the leader into a position that is uncomfortable or outside of his expertise. To me this is an understandable, but avoidable flaw. Understandable, because I think the fear of taking risks and failing is so widespread as to be almost unavoidable, even among those who articulate and understand the problems with failing to take risks. Avoidable, because I think leaders who are also general enough in their expertise are liable to not be intimidated by not having the requisite expertise to execute a decision. Why? Because a good generalist knows both where to find an appropriate expert, and also knows how to have the necessary conversations with said expert (or experts) in order to get enough information to make a decision.
Enough is a key word here. Perhaps, more than anything else, asking the right questions in order to get enough information is at the heart of leadership. No one person can know everything about everything, even in a simple situation with simple options and simple decisions. Instead, the leader is the person who is capable of making a decision with enough information. The 80/20 rule is the leader's best friend. If the first 80% of the information you need takes 20% of the work to acquire, and the remaining 20% takes the other 80% of the effort to acquire, best to make your decision based on 80% of the information.
For a high school student, all of that is probably a bit beyond their interest. The kind of leadership that occurs within a cohort of ten students in a two week program is of a different kind. Only, it's really not. There's a lot to be said for intuition, and it seems to me that good leaders arise even from among students because those students also know how to operate at the level of "good enough," and also know how to subsume their personal interests to those of the cohort (or, rather, realize that their personal interests and those of the cohort are the same thing). I suppose the challenge for we teachers - as leaders in hopefully both title and deed - is to empower those leaders among us to articulate not just their understanding of a situation, but their metacognition, their recognition of their own leadership and what makes it go.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The Plunge
This space is likely to be quite barren for the next two weeks while we run our next NALU 102 session. As many of you know, I recently took over for Manning Taite as Director of NALU Studies, a small non-profit that runs science education courses for at-risk kids. I'm sure I'll talk more about my experience in the last month as Director, and about the organization as a whole, in the future, but for now I just want to let my few readers know that my regular schedule of one or two (or, on occasion, three) posts a week is on haitus until late October.
In the meantime, make sure to watch some playoff baseball for me, and send your good vibes to Windward Community College in Kaneohe, Hawaii, where our brave students are about to embark on one of the most challenging and fun courses they've ever taken.
In the meantime, make sure to watch some playoff baseball for me, and send your good vibes to Windward Community College in Kaneohe, Hawaii, where our brave students are about to embark on one of the most challenging and fun courses they've ever taken.
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